Until Donald Trump bought this gale-battered stretch of coast north of Aberdeen, the Foveran Links were loved only by a small number of locals and a select group, tinier still, of ecologists. Yet this wild rampart of dunes on the North Sea coast can be magnificent. Rating it as a superlative example of its type in Europe, environmentalists believe the dunes will be irreversibly damaged now that the billionaire property developer has won his two-year planning battle to create the "world's greatest golf course".

The "great vistas and majestic dunes" had a "magical quality", Trump gushed earlier this year. With a neat twist of logic, he declared his course would "save" the dunes by arresting their movement, fixing them rigid with artificially planted grasses.

Environmental experts - including his own - disagree. His plans to place the back nine holes of his main 18-hole course here would decimate the links, designated a site of special scientific interest for four types of dune habitat: shifting dunes, fixed or grey dunes, decalcified fixed dunes and humid dune slacks, or hollows. They are home to what Trump's own expert described as an "excellent mosaic" of lichen-rich grasses, dune willow, sand sedge, common bent-grass and sheep's fescue, with soft rush, sweet grass and creeping bent-grass in the swampier areas.

In turn, the habitat supports wildlife such as skylarks, otters, pipistrelle bats, badgers and toads. The dunes are also periodic nesting sites for migratory pink-footed geese using the Ythan estuary, Sands of Forvie and Meikle Loch 3km to the north.

Yet despite its stark beauty, locals remain unconvinced that Trump can build a millionaires' paradise there. It is, after all, on the same latitude as southern Alaska. As Michael Forbes, the local salmon fisherman who refuses to sell Trump his unsightly 23-acre plot right next to the proposed course, put it on Monday after the news was announced: "Who in their right mind is going to come to this cold place and play golf? They'll come once and they'll never be back again."